Software That Kills

Okay, I've dealt with a lot of crappy software, but, to my knowledge, nothing I've used has killed anyone. The same cannot be said about "History's Worst Software Bugs," as compiled by Wired.

The article begins with a reminder of where the term "software bug" comes from:

...in 1947 when engineers found a moth in Panel F, Relay #70 of the Harvard Mark 1 system. The computer was running a test of its multiplier and adder when the engineers noticed something was wrong. The moth was trapped, removed and taped into the computer's logbook with the words: "first actual case of a bug being found."

And it goes on to discuss the following incidents:

1. July 28, 1962 -- Mariner I space probe.
2. 1982 -- Soviet gas pipeline.
3. 1985-1987 -- Therac-25 medical accelerator.
4. 1988 -- Buffer overflow in Berkeley Unix finger daemon.
5. 1988-1996 -- Kerberos Random Number Generator.
6. January 15, 1990 -- AT&T Network Outage.
7. 1993 -- Intel Pentium floating point divide.
8. 1995/1996 -- The Ping of Death.
9. June 4, 1996 -- Ariane 5 Flight 501.
10. November 2000 -- National Cancer Institute, Panama City. In

Yeesh, that's some crappy software!